With IE 4/5/6, MS also made a browser that was light-years ahead from a user's point of view than the competing browsers at the time from a speed and usability

With IE 4/5/6, MS also made a browser that was light-years ahead from a user's point of view than the competing browsers at the time from a speed and usability perspective. At the time, Netscape 4 was a bloated, buggy joke, and was happily doing stupid stuff like re-downloading the content it was displaying when you resized the main window because its caching was so atrocious. And this was in the days of 28.8k / 56.6k modems, so if you resized the window, you'd probably be waiting 30+ seconds for the webpage to redownload and redraw, during which Netscape would either lock up or display a blank page, whereas in IE it could instantly resize with the content it had locally. That meant a huge amount in those days.